Public Space goes down for the count?

Investor millions float San Francisco's land values, and the mortgaged land owners and the city's renters are paying through the bloody nose to live here, but most of that land value can travel right out of town. Meanwhile, what is most decidedly public land has practically become off-limits to the citizenry. Civic Center is being let out to corporate interests for the third time in six business days.

BIO hired much of Civic Center plaza last week for a fake daze through 1960's counter-culture San Francisco. BIO was the huge biotech conference that ran most of last week at Moscone Center. This past Monday Apple was given the core of the city when it rented Civic Center Plaza and Bill Graham Auditorium/Exhibition Hall. Wednesday and Thursday, June 15 and 16 the plaza has been gated again, this time for an unidentified at press time corporate event.

Renting out public space for city revenue might appeal to weak economic thinkers, but it is a species of public support of the elite. Here's how. Land values arise with the growth of community. If society doesn't recover the value it creates, then private interests will scarf it up and call it The American Way. The problem with that reasoning is that it endorses privilege. It is a privilege to own the material universe (that includes land locations). And it is a privilege to own the value of something made by somebody else. At present the owners of land get to collect the value of land despite that value being generated by community. Facilitating land owners in this "takings" is tantamount to donning the livery of local royalty and abasing oneself by declaring, economically speaking, "But for the magnanimity of Count Pelosi I would have no access to land."

The social math of the privatization of land values is easy to do. Those who are producing goods and services pay a substantial portion of those to the mere holders of land. When the general population learns to count, the Counts of San Francisco will no longer count. It's a cute axiom, but are we, as a society, going to prove it?